2
Lunch Date
All I hadto look forward to now was keeping the apartment and receiving a temporary alimony check that’d cover the rent since I earned a small fraction of the dough Peter raked in. I’d have just enough time to find a new career where I earned enough to pay my own way in the world.
Yay me.
I trudged back to the couch and slumped down, determined not to cry. I’m an ugly crier, no gentle tears or elegant glistening for me. No, when I cried it was turn on the waterworks, and prepare for swelling, hiccups, hyperventilation, and stomach aches. Oh, and the flushing. I’d turn red to the point where I had hives. People would offer me antihistamines just for something like a sad movie.
So yeah. I’d had enough tears for the time being. After all, Peter walked out almost a month ago. That it took this long for him to have the papers served should have encouraged me. But instead, waking up each day in the king bed we’d shared, a wedding present from my parents that now seemed obscenely oversized, and walking through a two-bedroom apartment echoing with the sounds of silent failure… all added to the weight of my misery. It was why I’d finally abandoned the bedroom to sleep on the couch. It shut off a chunk of the pain. Some of the time, anyway.
The box in my hands was just one burden too much for me to carry, and I felt myself start to crack. It began with a hitch of breath and my big, apparently unappealing DD tits shaking with the motion. Then there was the itchy face, and before I knew it, I was sobbing, curled up on the couch in a ball.
I was nothing.
I was no one.
I’d be alone for the rest of my life.
These thoughts ran around and around in my head as waves of sadness crashed through and over me. I grabbed the dish towel I was using in place of tissues and let the salty agony soak into it, riding it out.
Eventually, like all my crying jags, it stopped. I felt hollowed out, and at least for the moment, cauterized. Not that it would last. It was at best a temporary scab over an open wound. But at least I could breathe again, and if I still looked like a strawberry? Nobody was around to care.
My phone rang, and I was tempted to ignore it. But two years of living my professional and personal life almost totally by phone, e-mail, or Zoom left an instinctual part of me hungry to hear someone’s voice. Anyone’s, really. At that instant I would have listened to an entire telemarketer’s spiel about how solar panels would cut my energy bill, how I’d be so much better off with life insurance, or how I really needed a timeshare in some Florida swamp.
There were only two people I didn’t want to talk to. One was Peter, of course. The second? The perky little thing who was his new squeeze.
“Hello?”
“Honey, I’m out front. Are you running late?” my mother asked.
Mom? Out front?
Dammit. Lunch. “Oh my god, I totally forgot. Sorry, Mom.”
“Now, honey, we talked about this several times. You need to get out of the house. Are you trying to cancel on me now? After I drove all the way over?”
All the way over? She only lived ten minutes away.
And yes, my initial thought had been to cancel and send her on her way. But she’d just ruined that for me.
“I’m sorry, Mom. It will just take me a sec to get ready. I’ll be out in five.”
I trudged to the bathroom where I looked at myself hard for the first time in days. My greasy hair was piled on top of my head in a struggle-bun, and my PJs were all stretched out from wearing them for so long. My robe had a couple food stains down the front, probably from the canned spaghetti I’d been eating, and my untweezed eyebrows were starting to look like an overgrown hedge.
It was going to take a lot longer than five minutes to make this mess presentable.
But I could wing it. I sprayed half a can of dry shampoo on my hair and while it dried, washed my face and slapped on enough makeup and blush to look like I was, if not mentally healthy, then at least physically.
I squeezed into my largest pair of jeans—so much for all the working out—buckled myself into a minimizer bra, and pulled on a simple white blouse.
By the time I had my shoes on, it was time to brush out the dry shampoo. The stuff was miraculous as long as no one got too close. It hid the grease and fluffed up my hair at the same time.
I surprised myself when I looked in the mirror again. For a moment, I was looking at the old Gigi, pre-husband leaving, pre-feeling sorry for herself, and pre-watching soap operas.
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